No-go decay

Targets of NGD are poorly understood, but they appear to consist largely of mRNA transcripts on which ribosomes have stalled during translation. This stall can be caused by a variety of factors including strong secondary structures, which may physically block the translational machinery from moving down the transcript. Dom34/Hbs1 likely binds near the A site of stalled ribosomes and may facilitate recycling of complexes.In some cases, the transcript is also cleaved in an endonucleolytic fashion near the stall site; however the identity of the responsible endonuclease remains contentious. The fragmented mRNA molecules are then fully degraded by the exosome in a 3’ to 5’ fashion and by Xrn1 in a 5’ to 3’ fashion.